I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Only this simple everyday living and wilderness wandering seems natural and real, the other world, more like something read, not at all related to reality as I know it.
—Randy Morgenson, Charlotte Lake, 1966
WHEN RANDY MORGENSON hopped off that helicopter near the shores of the Rae Lakes on July 12, 1965, he landed in a new era of wilderness. The early environmental movement had long fought for the idea of protecting the wilds, not exploiting them. Now, with the passing of the Wilderness Act the year before, the National Park Service was struggling to balance two wholly conflicting philosophies mandated by the new law—preservation and use. Even pre–Wilderness Act, Sequoia and Kings Canyon had implemented grazing restrictions in certain areas where heavy use, if continued, would have turned mountain meadows into dirt fields. Other areas, the Rae Lakes in particular, had been so heavily used by campers that dead and down wood that could be burned as firewood was almost depleted. In cases such as this, camping and grazing of stock was limited to one night, and a recent invention for cooking—the backpacker stove—was encouraged. Without these and other controls, it was predicted, the High Sierra wilderness would never recover.
Referencing a range of ecological studies, the parks’ scientists compiled a backcountry management plan in 1960 that outlined ever-increasing populations. They proposed a set of experimental rules and regulations that, if adhered to, would theoretically save the backcountry from becoming another frontcountry.
Randy represented a new generation of clean-shaven and uniformed rangers with military-cropped haircuts who, like military grunts, were stationed on the front lines but, as seasonal employees, held the lowest rank. Their challenge was to introduce this way of thinking to a cast of backpackers, fishermen, horsemen, and climbers, who weren’t always receptive to new ideas.
In young Ranger Randy, the Park Service had been delivered the perfect foot soldier, though his gentle nature made him more of an archangel crusading in a green uniform. He already considered the High Sierra his church; the backcountry management plan became his bible. The report read like scripture to Randy, warning of an impending doomsday and often citing his childhood home, Yosemite, as an example of what could occur. Here, in the backcountry of Sequoia and Kings Canyon, man’s presence had not yet dismembered Mother Wilderness—but she was barely holding on.
Armageddon was upon them.
Besides his academic knowledge of that report and a genuine desire to protect his beloved wilderness from the proverbial fires of hell, Randy had brought with him an innate love and enthusiasm for the Sierra as well as the ability to survive in its wilds. The plants and the animals were his kindred spirits; the geology and waterways were his temples. But he didn’t know first aid or CPR. He wore no sidearm, carried no handcuffs. Disarming, much less defending himself from, an armed suspect was the stuff of movies, not his reality. The skills required to lower an injured climber off a precarious cliff or rescue a drowning hiker from swift whitewater had not been taught in ranger training because there was no formal training for seasonal backcountry rangers at Sequoia and Kings Canyon.
His job was to hike the trails and “spread the gospel” to as many visitors as possible. He issued fire permits, picked up trash, hung Mountain Manners signs, naturalized campsites, and if there was an emergency—medical, forest fire, whatever—he was to tend to the situation as best he could and radio for assistance. In 1965, he knew none of the skills that would become second nature as he traveled down the high and lonely path of these parks’ most trained—some would call them elite—backcountry rangers.
Despite his fit, but certainly not commanding, 5-foot-8-inch, 140-pound frame, Randy was, in these parts, the law of the land. Add youth to his stature, however, and the National Park Service patch on his shoulder and silver badge on his chest gave him little more law enforcement presence than an Eagle Scout at a bank robbery. But that didn’t mean he didn’t take the rangers’ motto seriously. Each morning he pinned the National Park Ranger badge above his left chest pocket; he was prepared to “protect the people from the park, and the park from the people.” It was his mantra.
He soon learned, however, that his main duty that summer was to collect garbage—gunnysacks full of it. The second-most-prevalent chore was cleaning up “improved campsites,” which meant tearing down the log-and-granite dining tables and kitchen areas sheltered behind rock-wall windbreaks. Fire pits were his nemesis, engineering feats he deemed “fire castles” for their sheer immensity. They often came complete with iron grates that campers hid in nearby hollow logs or hung from trees when they left the mountains. Generations of families had been coming to these spots for years—sometimes kicking out other campers who were squatting on their campsite. Imagine their surprise when they couldn’t find “their” campsite and a young, mustached Ranger Randy materialized out of the woods to explain that the area was being “naturalized.”
“Natural-what? I just want to know where my fireplace is!”
It was predictable. The parks’ management plan had a section entitled “Wilderness Protection vs. Personal Freedom,” in which was written, “Oldtime use of wilderness was completely free of restrictions. Wilderness explorers could hunt and fish without limit, cut down trees at will, camp, make fires and graze their stock anywhere. The tradition of personal freedom in wilderness dies hard…. But when human populations expand they become subject to the biological limitations that govern other dense populations: the greater the number of individuals the greater the loss of individual freedom.”
Translated: “Sorry, sir, the fireplace your grandfather built with your father has been obliterated, but I replaced it with this highly functional, less obtrusive fire ring that’s—yes, sir, I realize it’s quite small, but it will still provide plenty of warmth and cooking surface, not to mention you won’t have to burn an entire tree each time you light it. By the way, you won’t be needing that ax. The new regulations allow only foraging for deadfall on the ground. Oh, and please don’t cut pine boughs for your bed—that’s illegal now as well. Have a nice day.”
Randy, who was neither so blunt nor so stiff, strove to respect past freedoms, introducing the new rules and regulations to more than 1,200 park visitors in his patrol area that season without hearing a complaint. The only citation he issued was to a backpacker who had brought his dog with him, which led to a discussion about the difference between national parks and the national forests bordering the parks, which are managed by a much looser set of use regulations. That first season was devoid of any major emergencies: Randy treated one person for blisters, and a dehydrated girl who felt sick merely needed to force down water. He destroyed seventy-five oversized fire pits and collected thirteen gunnysacks of garbage that were hauled out of the mountains by mules. As the summer progressed, he earned his reputation as a devoted and diplomatic workhorse who once hiked 16 round-trip miles to tear down a haphazard community of campsites that he’d heard was destroying the serenity of a remote lake. Exhausted after hours of moving rock and logs, he embarked on the 8-mile return to his station and discovered en route one of the Sierra’s legendary can dumps—a rusting midden that couldn’t be passed by. After loading his pack with 50 pounds or more of glass and cans, he returned home well after dark to collapse in his sleeping bag.
He lived in the spartan accommodations of a tent on the shore of Middle Rae Lake and recorded his simplified life with the romanticized pen one might expect from an inspired 23-year-old truant from society who had been raised on a diet of nature writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Aldo Leopold, and Henry David Thoreau. “There is a low plant that grows profusely everywhere, composed of a ‘cup’ of several leaves pointing nearly straight up,” Randy wrote after some afternoon rain showers. “The whole is maybe half an inch high, and they form carpets that one could take for a meadow. Whenever it rains a large drop of water collects in the bottom of this cup and glimmers like the brightest diamond in a green rosette when the sun comes out…the most brilliant diamond one could imagine.”
After one patrol, he returned to his station, where “the evening alpenglow on the peaks filled me with a feeling of bigness inside,” he wrote. “As I rounded the final edge of lower Rae the jumping fish dotted the lake with their rings. So still was the air I could hear the splashing…and as they jumped clear of the water I could see momentary flashes of silver bodies. Descending the final slope to my cabin, looking out over Arrowhead Lake and toward Pinchot Pass in the diffused pinkish light, I felt positively exhilarated. I know exactly how Henry Thoreau felt when running home after the rain. ‘Grow wild according to your nature, like these brakes and sedges which will never become English hay, let the thunder rumble.’”
Indeed, Middle Rae Lake was his Walden Pond; the surrounding peaks, basins, and meadows were his Sand County.
There was something different about staying in one general area that Randy’s previous summer’s hike on the John Muir Trail had not revealed to him, a satisfying sense of ownership that came with the job: not a selfish, territorial bent, but more the pride a homeowner feels for his property. With that sentiment came a respect for his endearing neighbors—the marmot family that had taken up residence in a burrow near his cabin’s doorstep and the rosy finches and Clark’s nutcrackers that vied for his attention as he strolled down the trails.
The fragile mountain meadows became Randy’s personal cause, no doubt impassioned by childhood walks with his father and brother. If a packer grazed his mules in a closed meadow or a poorly informed backpacker pitched his tent on anything green instead of on gravel, it was as if they had desecrated Randy’s yard—the church’s gardens.
His supervisor, a well-liked ranger by the name of Dick McLaren, gave Randy a line of advice to which he would adhere for the rest of his career: “The best way to teach the public isn’t with a citation, it’s with communication.” And so Randy would offer to help move an ill-placed camp or catch an uncooperative mule in a wet meadow, and gently explain the reasons behind the rules—sometimes to the packer, sometimes to the mule, to the amusement of the packer. A story that would become legendary in Sequoia and Kings Canyon was about the backpacker who asked Randy the name of a tiny flower he had pitched his tent upon. Randy apologized and told the backpacker that he knew only the flower’s “book name.” He explained that he hadn’t figured out how to ask the flower its real name, but thanked the backpacker for his interest. The hiker likely never pitched his tent again without carefully checking what was underneath it.
But the living flowers, grasses, and animals weren’t all that tugged at Randy’s heartstrings. Even the granite peaks—cast in a surreal glow each morning and night—hypnotized him with their sublime, quiet beauty and mystery. Among these high crags were secret passageways, long forgotten or never explored, that called out to him. After staring at one such cleft for more than two months, he devoted one of his days off to satisfying his curiosity. With some difficult scrambling and climbing, he reached the crux, which was a doorway into a hidden basin enclosed by an amphitheater of stone, where water flowed literally from solid rock.
As he crossed the threshold of the notch, it was as if the mountains were sharing a verdant secret with him. He described it as “some of the most beautiful country in this area, perhaps because it is pure—untouched, untrammeled, and unlittered.” He explored the shores of silent glacial tarns, finding no other footprints. The flowers grew as they should at these heights, where the soil’s nutrients had gathered, sustaining them in “small patches or tufts between the boulders,” without fear of being plucked or smashed by a hiker or eaten by a mule. There were no blackened fire pits or piles of rusting cans, though there was a flat spot above the meadow that had been someone’s barely perceptible sleeping spot. The haven he’d been drawn to was, according to Randy, “rich country,” symbolizing not only the past but also what he hoped would be the future for these mountains.
AS RANDY RELAXED into the daily regimen of life as a backcountry ranger, Dana and Esther Morgenson were increasingly anxious back in Yosemite. They weren’t concerned for his safety in the mountains—they were confident he could handle anything the Sierra might throw at him.
They were, however, worried about the rumblings of a draft. On July 9, 1965, just three days before Randy was airlifted into the backcountry, President Johnson acknowledged in a news conference that his administration was considering a call-up of reservists and expanding current military draft quotas. Randy was of age, and Dana and Esther knew that no amount of wilderness could shield him from the Selective Service and Vietnam. The Morgenson family had seen what military service in a war zone had done to Larry’s spirit. Larry, whom Randy had once looked up to as an artistic and talented storyteller, a tireless skier, an older brother with worldly aspirations, had atrophied after the Korean War into living his life within the constraints of a bottle. The drink helped curb what would later be called post-traumatic stress. Regardless of the reasons behind Larry’s uninspired life, family and friends marked the beginning of the decline with his military service. Even knowing this, Randy had told his parents that he would serve his country if he was drafted. He “wouldn’t like it,” he said, but if he was called, he would go.
Toward the end of the season, Dana and Bill Taylor—Randy’s childhood friend—hiked into the backcountry for a visit and were surprised to see how much weight he had lost. It was impossible for a foot ranger not to lose weight; he simply could not consume enough calories at altitude, especially with a canned-food diet. They brought with them homemade cookies from Esther, which Randy rationed sparingly after meals.
Seeking his father’s expertise, Randy told him of the flowers that had appeared like diamonds after the rain. Dana instantly recognized the description as bilberry, but he and Randy hiked to the spot to confirm. The conversation, as it often did, segued into school.
Bill Taylor thought that with the threat of a draft, Randy was crazy even to consider not going back to school. Full-time students were eligible for deferment, a no-brainer to Bill. Dana expressed his concerns as well.
If Randy went back to school in the fall and spring, he could come back to the high country the following summer. That wouldn’t be an option if he were to be drafted. He agreed to think about it.
Back in Yosemite, Dana confided his concerns to Randy’s friend Nancy Williams, a young woman who worked with Dana in the Curry Company’s accounting department. Dana expressed to her his disappointment in Randy for not continuing his education and his worry that he was exposing himself to the draft. But Nancy understood that “Randy was answering a higher calling.” She describes it as an irresistible pull, like Jack London’s “call of the wild.” “I think Randy had a distinct purpose in life,” Williams says, “and back then, he wasn’t exactly sure what that purpose was. He just followed his heart, which wasn’t in the classroom. The mountains were his classroom.”
Such idealistic reasoning provided Dana and Esther little respite from their worries. War, they knew, was not their son’s calling—he wasn’t programmed for it. Before he’d left for the mountains, they had urged him to continue with his education. In the mountains, Randy reasoned, that was exactly what he was doing. When he wasn’t writing in his logbook or practicing with the camera Ansel Adams had given him, he was memorizing the backcountry management plan.
As summer edged toward fall, Randy made it a point to speak with everybody he encountered. His knowledge and charm led people to invite him for dinner at their camps, and he reciprocated by inviting backpackers into his tiny yet cozy cabin for tea when a rainstorm passed overhead. Despite his comfort with solitude, he was extremely social and could dive into conversation and not come up for air for hours. On one long patrol to Upper Basin, he met a man and his daughter atop Pinchot Pass and spent some time with them, chatting about the Sierra. Afterward, Randy turned to hike down into Marjorie Lake Basin, toward Bench Lake. The father, obviously impressed by the young ranger, told him, “I hope this is your career—we need you.”
“I was pleased,” wrote Randy in his logbook, “that he felt I was a credit to the service.”
FOR WHATEVER REASON—to avoid the war or to please his parents—Randy was back at Arizona State College in Flagstaff the following fall. He carried with him the memories of an enchanted summer, and a folder that bore the quote:
Wilderness
An area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.
—Howard Zahniser
Perhaps it was a tribute to Zahniser, a former executive director of The Wilderness Society, as well as the author of the Wilderness Act. He had died four months before President Johnson signed the act into law on September 3, 1964. Or maybe it just kept Randy’s mind in the right place as he studied cultural linguistics, religious philosophies, and Asian cultures and philosophy, all classes that played into his longstanding dream of visiting the tallest mountains in the world: the Himalayas.
Not unlike the military, the Peace Corps used romantic photographs of exotic locales to entice potential volunteers and recruits. Such photos of Asia, and in particular the Himalayas, struck a chord when Randy happened by a Peace Corps booth at his school, where, as in many other college towns and campuses, Peace Corps recruiters shared the sidewalks with Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine recruiters. In 1966, the Peace Corps was considered either an honorable exemption from the draft or, as Richard Nixon put it, a “haven for draft dodgers.” The crowds gathered around the Peace Corps recruiters told the story of that era.
As with many things in his life, Randy didn’t consider being drawn to the Peace Corps to be merely a chance encounter. He filled out an application, requesting Asia as his top choice. There were no guarantees, but he made it clear that the Himalaya region was his dream assignment—another beckoning doorway that seemed to be leading him down a specific path in life.
“The master intended for me a life in the wilderness, a life of awareness and discovery of the forces of nature and humanity. A life…that carries me toward more entire manhood, and perhaps one that brings some of this into the rest of the world, counterbalancing some of the forces that presently carry us along.”
Randy wrote this in a letter to his parents while looking out from the terrace of the mud house he had been assigned in the village of Golapangri, in the Maharashtra region of India. It had been more than a year since the Peace Corps acceptance letter was delivered to him by mule at the Charlotte Lake station during his second year as a backcountry ranger. His journey from that point forward continued like a fable.
RANDY HAD BARELY STRAYED from Yosemite’s granite womb when he boarded a jet and set out on a pilgrimage to the abode of the gods, the land of the Sherpa who climbed the mountains of the Himalayas with reverence and awe. To gaze upon those majestic peaks and walk even in their shadows was the ultimate treasure he sought when he joined the Peace Corps. Any assignment, he felt, would be worth the reward.
For two years he lived in a small village nearly 2,000 miles from the mountains of his dreams. His vistas were dry and dusty farmland, void of anything green, and flat for as far as the eye could see. The Himalayas were “over there” somewhere beyond the horizon, where the sweltering 115-degree heat distorted the view. He would awaken each morning and watch the village come to life: women bringing the day’s water home from a central well with jugs balanced on their heads, bullock carts bouncing off toward the fields, smoke from cook fires, and neighbors chatting over mud walls. “It seemed a thousand or two thousand years ago,” he wrote. Everything was exotic, from the colorful open-air markets, always with Indian music blaring “to the point of distortion” from unseen speakers, to the slow, rural pace.
While Randy taught the farmers “Western” agriculture techniques, the Indians taught him their religion. He came to understand the prayer rituals at the village temple, the daily offerings at family shrines, the deities—more so, he thought, than he might have learned had he stayed at the university his parents wished him to attend.
One day, Randy’s Indian friend Limbaji explained how everybody in the village thought he was a Christian. Randy, who had erected a Christmas tree that December in his mud home, replied that he did not consider himself a Christian.
However: “Your people are Hindu, my people are Christian; you are an Indian, I am an American; your skin is dark, my skin is white,” he said. He held his pale arm against Limbaji’s dark skin. “What is the difference?” asked Randy. “There is no difference—we are the same.”
At this, Limbaji grinned widely and reached for a stone. “But this is what different religions mean,” he said, placing the stone on the ground. “God is for all men, he is always the same. There is only one. And all men finally go to the same God.” He drew lines toward the stone in the dust. “But there are different roads.”
From the dry seasons to the monsoons, Randy put his 720 hours of training to the test as one of fifty individuals in the Peace Corps India Food Production Project. By the end of two years, Randy and the other volunteers had shown the Indian farmers how to double, sometimes triple, the yields of their crops. It seemed they had, after many roadblocks, succeeded in their quest. Not long before Randy left, he asked one of the farmers whom he’d worked especially closely with if he intended to continue farming the land as he had been taught.
The farmer, with a cheery disposition, said no, they wouldn’t. Once the volunteers left, he explained, most of the farmers would go back to their old ways.
Randy couldn’t believe his ears. “Why?” he asked.
“Because,” said the farmer, “that is how you farm in America. This is how we farm in India.”
Dumbfounded, Randy packed his bags and traveled down the roads of Eastern religions in Nepal, Thailand, Cambodia, China, and Japan. In the religious melting pot of Kathmandu, he began to favor aspects of both Hinduism and Buddhism. In Bangkok, he explored hedonism; it had been a long time since he’d been in the company of a woman. In Japan he was drawn to the meditative contemplations of Zen. But it was in the Himalayas that he experienced his greatest pleasures and felt most at home.
Randy enrolled in a monthlong guide school taught by Sherpas to learn technical mountaineering skills and expedition planning. When he completed the course, the school’s head instructor, Wangdhi Sherpa, wrote a letter of recommendation in broken English, stating that Randy Morgenson “is keenly interested in the mountaineering and he has proved that his climbing tactics in rock and high altitude during the course. He is very cheerful all the time and good discipline among the peoples. We have no doubt he is a good mountaineering in the future.”
Within weeks of finishing the course, Randy organized his own expedition to climb Hanuman Tibba, a 19,450-foot peak named after a Hindu god. It was reportedly only the third or fourth ascent (there was some dispute about one of the claims), which was an attraction, but first and foremost, the mountain was beautiful. He hired a high-altitude porter and two Sherpa guides, and climbed successively for eight days to establish a high camp. He experienced near-vertical slopes where the front-points of his crampons were all that were in contact with the mountain and there was nothing but air beneath his heels; he felt the sickening sensation of dropping suddenly as a snow bridge settled while he crossed a crevasse; and he understood the satisfying “thunk” an ice ax makes when it is placed solidly in “good snow.” He learned to breathe and walk at altitude, to build anchors in the snow and rocks, and to work as a rope team in dangerous terrain and playfully torment his rope mates in safe terrain. He came to appreciate “bed tea” served by the Sherpas, and made it a point to awaken early one morning in order to return the favor to his bewildered crew, who had never been served tea by a Westerner, especially a Westerner paying for their services.
Randy summited the peak at 9:15 A.M. in June 1969 after a 3:30 A.M. start. The view was completely obscured by clouds.
Since he had first read about the Himalayas, “I’ve wanted to enter this world,” Randy wrote his parents, “to live some time among the higher peaks, surrounded by ice and snow and deep blue sky only…a silent world. An intense world.” He continued to trek through the Himalayas, visiting Everest’s base camp and climbing a handful of peaks that approached 20,000 feet, always with just a few porters and Sherpas, for all of whom Randy prepared and served tea as a sign of respect.
“Now I’ve really become expedition minded,” he wrote his parents. “I have thoughts about doing this sort of mountaineering again, beginning with winter mountaineering in the Sierra, and including vague intentions of returning to the Himalaya. Oh there are so many mountains: Alaska, the Andes, the Rockies, and Cascades, and yes, even the Alps. And such a late start I am getting.
“How wonderful to wander among virgin hills! I suppose whiteness is a symbol of purity (skin color being an exception) and how pure I found that world. As you’ve heard me say many times, the mountains are my life. Without them I am nothing. They are perhaps the only reality I know. They are my guru. If I am to learn anything in life, I will learn it there.”
After three and a half years, Randy flew home. During the drive from the San Francisco airport, he was blessed with a clear day, able to look east toward the white-tipped spires of “his” mountains—the same “snowy saw-teeth” of the Sierra Nevada that captivated Spanish explorers when they sailed into San Francisco Bay in the mid-1500s. As he drew closer, he felt in his heart the pull of the high country. And so the moral of his fabled travels read like Santiago’s, the boy in Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist: Randy had traveled around the world in search of treasure and came home to find it in his own backyard.
He placed the cherished letter from Wangdhi Sherpa into a box and filed his memories neatly, as one does with memories from great journeys. And then he made the telephone call to his old boss at Sequoia and Kings Canyon and held his breath after inquiring whether there was still room on his backcountry ranger staff.
“When can you start?” asked the district ranger.
AFTER HIS SABBATICAL overseas, Randy, at age 28, was assigned to deep, dark LeConte Canyon, where every day he awoke and looked to the sky, usually from his sleeping bag, beyond the tops of the lodgepole and white-bark pine to the granite spire of Mount Langile. As guardian of LeConte Canyon, Langile was first to feel the warmth of the sun each morning and last to bathe in its glory from the west come sunset. Randy tuned in to these and other cycles, noting that after the third week in July, the hermit thrush often stopped singing; that here in the canyon’s bottom the robin’s song was heard, but above 10,000 feet it scarcely, if ever, used its voice.
His job hadn’t changed since 1966; neither had the physical attributes of the high country. But the spirituality of the place had shifted noticeably since his travels in the East. LeConte Canyon was no longer just a wooded canyon with sheer walls and a melodic rushing river. It was a massive meditation garden, the antithesis of the “superorderly” domesticated Japanese gardens that were “clipped, trimmed, and cleaned” to the point of sterility. In Kyoto, Randy had watched temple gardeners sweeping the dirt beneath trees. “No sooner does a leaf fall,” wrote Randy in his diary, “than it is swept away and burned.”
Randy preferred what he described as the “shaggy wildness of nature untended.” He was “nourished” by the chaotic glacial rubble of the Sierra, where rotting tree bark and fallen pine needles obscured the lesser-traveled footpaths. There were no bonsai gardeners sculpting their human vision. Instead, there was the unpredictable, gusting winds that pummeled altitude-stunted pines to the finest artistic expression.
The influences of the religious roads his Indian friend Limbaji had spoken of—Hinduism and Zen Buddhism in particular—were synthesized here on his own chosen path, where his bible was still the Sequoia and Kings Canyon Backcountry Management Plan. When he tore down fire pits, he referenced in his logbooks for years to come that he was doing the work of Shiva, the Hindu “destroyer” deity who, appropriately, possessed contradicting powers—the ability both to destroy and to restore. He carefully placed the rocks in rivers to wash away burn scars, or buried them halfway in the duff of the forests, or carried them great distances from popular campsites to discourage campers from rebuilding the fire pits.
On September 8, 1971, Randy hiked to the summit of 13,034-foot Mount Solomon and wrote in the peak register: “We are the greatest bulldozers to walk erect. Will we ever permit, in a small place as here, Mother Nature—truly our Mother—to do her thing, undisturbed and unmarred? Will we ever be content to play a passively observant role in the universe, and leave off this unceasing activity? I don’t wish man in control of the universe. I wish nature in control, and man playing only his just role as one of its inhabitants. I want every blade of grass standing naturally, as it was when pushed through the soil with Spring vigor. I want the stones and gravel left in the Autumn as Spring melt-water left them. Only these natural places, apart from my tracks, give me joy, exhilaration, understanding. What humanity I have has come from my relations with these mountains.”
Such was the naturalist bent Randy conveyed to the public as he patrolled these remote mountains. But the outdoor recreation boom of the 1970s was upon these mountains, and with it came a crop of nontraditional visitors to the national parks. Even though miles of rugged wilderness separated his mountain paradise from civilization, the role of Randy—and all rangers—was on the verge of a drastic change of focus from gentle, approachable naturalist to law enforcer.
The catalyst in this movement probably began with what has come to be known as the Yosemite Riots. It was the Fourth of July 1970, and between 500 and 700 youths gathered to whoop it up at Stoneman Meadow, not far from Randy’s childhood home. In contrast, that same day Randy patrolled 11 miles from LeConte Canyon to Dusy Basin and back, during which he saw only a dozen camps and thirty-four backpackers. “Quiet for the 4th,” he wrote in his logbook. About the time he settled down for a simple dinner, a few rangers went into Stoneman Meadow’s crowd of so-called hippies and tried to get them to disperse, explaining how they were damaging the meadow. When nobody budged, some mounted rangers announced a mandatory curfew. Details are sketchy from this point forward, but the youths—now allegedly a stoned and drunk mob—considered the curfew a challenge and stood their ground.
Then, “rangers, fireguards, and anyone else who could reasonably be put on a horse or asked to walk into the crowd, did,” says one ranger. They had “no riot training. No nothing. They got thrown out of the meadow immediately after a brief skirmish where rocks and bottles were thrown.”
The rangers, up against their first major civil disobedience encounter, regrouped and were joined by local sheriff’s deputies for “special emergency assistance.” By the time the night was over, nearly 200 youths had been taken into custody. The national media had a field day, and a recurring theme publicized the need for rangers to be better trained in law enforcement tactics and crowd control. The national parks had lost forever their identity as wilderness sanctuaries. The Granite Womb, it appeared, was not immune to urban crowds and violence.
As Randy continued his relatively quiet, oftentimes meditative, existence deep in the backcountry of Sequoia and Kings Canyon, the National Park Service geared up to avoid such a fiasco in the future.
In the wake of the riots, the Department of the Interior allocated to Yosemite a substantial budget to handpick and/or recruit a cadre of about fifteen rangers, many of whom had law enforcement backgrounds or special skills that might prove helpful in dealing with the youthful element frequenting the parks in the 1970s. Once at Yosemite, this group received special training in everything a modern-day ranger might require, from search-and-rescue tactics in the backcountry to emergency medical training to law enforcement tactics—physical, verbal, and psychological.
One objective was to create a nucleus of the best rangers to ever wear an NPS badge. This almost exclusively male group strived to climb better, ski better, provide the best visitor services, be the best emergency medical technicians, the best pistol shots—you name it, their goal was nothing less than excellence. “We wanted to deal humanely with these nontraditional visitors who frequented Yosemite in the early 1970s,” says Rick Smith, a seasonal ranger who was recruited from within Yosemite’s staff. “We were as good with a 5-year-old on his or her first visit to Yosemite as we were with a young person who came to the park to smoke his or her first joint.”
In time this group came to be known as the Yosemite Mafia, and its influence resonated throughout the agency. “They were an incredibly talented group of people who, by force of personality and example, raised the bar on professionalization in every aspect of ranger work,” says one veteran ranger who worked with many of the original recruits. But some rangers weren’t excited about this new über-ranger mentality. The old guard continued to cling to the image of the friendly jack-of-all-trades ranger whose skill came from some mystical osmosis with the wilderness. The Randy Morgensons of the NPS had little interest in law enforcement.
Most of the Yosemite recruits became dedicated lifers—company men, so to speak—who worked their way up the ranks to hold positions at the highest levels of the National Park Service, from subdistrict rangers to district rangers to chief rangers to park superintendents—all the way to Washington, D.C., and the Department of the Interior.
Back in the early 1970s, the Yosemite Mafia tended to expand its talents by recruiting rangers with promise who would then hire and train other rangers who would then transfer to different parks. There was no grand design or mission, but as a result of these recruiting practices, the nation became permeated with a staff of top-notch rangers capable of handling whatever the public and the parks could dish out.
It wouldn’t be long before Randy Morgenson’s name came up for consideration.